zooxanthellae's Profile

If you were interested in this article you might be interested in the author's blog, marginalrevolution.com. He's actually an economist, and the blog tends to focus on economics, but he discusses food now and again. The comments tend to be quite good, too (although the whole thing is a little too conservative for me to wholeheartedly endorse).

My grandmother says she has a book of Indian recipes that go back to the late 1800s/early 1900s, but many of the units are either archaic (e.g. a "viss") or denominated in currencies that no longer exist (it would be like having an Italian recipe call for a florin of tomatoes - don't check the math on that one, a florin is actually around $200 apparently). So they'd have to be indexed for inflation to be of any use.

I'll take one for the cake pop team and say that I actually like cake pops. They're just discrete bites of cake. I've never seen them priced reasonably in a bakery, but I make them myself so I don't think that' a valid point of objection.

Yeah. Making a big extravagant meal for myself seems kind of pointless, so when I eat alone it usually ends up being pretty sparse. My go-to lunch used to be canned tuna (without mayonnaise or anything), salad leaves, and toast. No seasoning or anything, I just liked the way the ingredients themselves tasted, it was easy, and it was healthy.

I'm looking for any (free, preferably) eBooks or PDFs about the theoretical side of cooking, i.e. something more like "La Technique" or even "On Food and Cooking". Even something about the science of taste would be neat.

Thus far the closest thing I've been able to find is a free English translation of "Guide Culinaire" (http://www.archive.org/details/cu3192...). Unfortunately, I have nowhere near enough experience to be able to get much out of it. Also, it's an enormous file.

Thoughts? Most of the free eBooks on Amazon about cooking don't look promising.

I came up with 3, no real order. Of course I learnt a lot from my mom and grandmother, but I don't really consider them icons.

1. MFK Fisher - I read a compilation of her work a few years ago when I was 15 or 16 and it really made me appreciate food more and consider it more thoughtfully. I'd say "culinary awakening" if it wasn't so purple.

2. Alton Brown - helped me to see cooking as a variety of techniques, ingredients, etc. in different combinations rather than as an enormous mass of recipes. Made cooking more scientific and so, for me, more approachable.

3. Grant Achatz - inspired me to experiment and make my own recipes, some of which I've been very pleased with and others which have been pretty terrible. Exploration is fun!

I bought a bag of Mariani dried apricots and one of the listed ingredients is "Medium Chain Triglycerides (Coconut and/or Palm Kernel)". And apricots, if it isn't just my imagination, have a slightly "buttery" aftertaste. But the fat content in a 1/4 cup serving is still listed as 0g (so I assume this means it's <0.5g). Also, the apricots feel much moister and juicier than normal.

Does anyone know why these are in there? I've never seen these in other dried apricots.

I don't know if it was always like this, but I think that the current Forbes model (online at least) is to just troll for as many page-views as possible. That's why they're always producing things like "13 Awesomest Towns" where you have to click to a new page for each item in the list.

I don't know why you're interested - it seems like whenever a competitor says "I decided to use the ice cream machine", within the next few minutes he invariably says "my ice cream is coming out horribly" (joke).

Oh, just to clarify, I meant I generally don't drink things for any other reason than thirst. The only thing I drink besides water is milk, which makes me sound especially lame, but hey.

And by "alcohol's physical effect" I meant that it seems like "buzzed" people tend to be a little happier and exuberant, so that might make a meal more enjoyable. I didn't mean that the food actually tastes sharper or anything.

If you're looking for a more mass-market jerky, I think Whole Foods' Organic 365 is good. It certainly tastes better to me than the Oberto, Jack Links stuff found in most supermarkets. It isn't cheap, though.

I don't drink, never have and don't plan to. Part of it is that I generally don't like drinking things: soda, coffee, juice, etc. just don't do anything for me. The other is that family members have had some issues with alcoholism so, from a genetic standpoint, I see no reason to start.

Having said that, how important would you say drinking is to eating? I have certainly seen a great deal of fuss made over wine pairings, with the cost of the wine sometimes outweighing the cost of the food. Does it really make food that much better, or is it just a nice thing to have? I.e., when a person drinks some nice wine with some nice food (technical terms here) how much better does the wine make the food? Is it just that the food and wine are nice together or that the wine makes the food go from good to great? And how much of this is just the alcohol's physical effect?

Thanks for any responses to what is, I'll admit, a pretty convoluted question.

It's strange - I can't think of another fast food-item that earns as much devotion from chowhounds as the filet-o-fish sandwich. I've never liked it, so does anyone want to comment on what's so unusually awesome about it?

I'm not sure how "popular" this is, but I have a pretty low tolerance for stinky cheese. Morbier is about as far as I go. I really wanted to like the Blue Stilton that I bought a little while ago and was just totally turned off by the odd "plastic" pungency.

However, I'll note that Stilton is apparently great with port, but I consumed it alone because I don't drink.

I will second Kashi. I'm a college student and looked for a very long time for a healthy, not-terribly-expensive cereal and GoLean was what I settled on. As a result I've ordered a few 6-packs of boxes (over a year or so). It's a great cereal because it's high in fiber and protein and is only mildly sweet. And when I say mild, i do mean mild, not just in comparison to Cocoa Puffs.